Father-son duo Stephen King and Joe Hill team up for "Throttle," a high-octane short story inspired by Steven Spielberg's movie "Duel." In King and Hill's take, a vicious 18-wheeler runs down a motorcycle gang on a stretch of desert highway. Full of adrenaline, vulgarity and gratuitous violence, "Throttle" succeeds as a quick, pulpy and sadistically fun summer read. Color chapter illustrations by Nelson Daniel of long-haired dudes on souped-up bikes lend the story a comic book edge, furthering the caricature strokes of the writing. (In fact, IDW adapted the title into a comic book series called "Road Rage.") King and Hill clearly have a good time with their dark bit of fantasy.

Each week, "Selected Shorts" pairs quick stories with celebrity readers for an hour-long podcast. On the June 13 episode, fantasy writer Neil Gaiman hosts a reading of two stories pegged to the theme "Illusions." In "Miracle Polish" by Steven Millhauser (read by actor Paul Hecht), the protagonist buys a bottle of mirror polish from a down-and-out salesman and later finds his reflection isn't quite what he recalled. In a nice complement, "The Open Window" by Saki (the pen name of H.H. Munro) is a ghost story of sorts featuring a hypochondriac, a theatrical young girl and a hunting party gone missing. The choice of actors Hecht and Tandy Cronyn as narrators — tied together with Gaiman's cool, witty commentary — lends the production a nice dramatic edge.

How I Met My Dead Parents by Anya Yurchyshyn

30-minute read, BuzzFeed, free

Before you dismiss BuzzFeed as solely click bait, reconsider with Anya Yurchyshyn's poignant essay, "How I Met My Dead Parents." The project began as an anonymous Tumblr of photographs, love notes and journal entries from the author's late parents. It evolved into an essay about how the blog shifted Yurchyshyn's understanding of her family, her grief and herself. Yurchyshyn contrasts her lingering anger with her overly strict father and alcoholic mother with the items she discovered after their deaths; their memorabilia tells a different story than the strained marriage she knew. The people she discovers through these letters and photos are world travelers with quick tempers; they're full of passion and humor. "Going through my parents' stuff didn't make me suddenly miss them, but I became more intrigued by them every day," she writes. Readers of this essay will likely feel the same.